Two years spent in the study of Sanskrit under Charles Lanman and a year in the mazes of Patanjali's metaphysics under the guidance of James Woods, left me in a state of enlightened mystification. A good half of the effort of understanding what the Indian philosophers were after – and their subtleties make most of the great European philosophers look like schoolboys – lay in trying to erase from my mind all the categories and kinds of distinction common to European philosophy from the time of the Greeks.

We must recognize a sense in which, while all systems lead us back to the point from which we started, yet as the experience of the trip is what we are out for, the choice of route is all important. In reality our whole view of life is at stake in the finest shred of logic that we chop.